The Most Beautiful Places in North Holland
9 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in North Holland are Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House. The list covers 9 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
North Holland is the province where the Dutch Golden Age was made. Much of it is land reclaimed from water, held by dikes and drained by windmills, and in the seventeenth century Amsterdam turned that hard-won ground into the richest trading city in Europe. The wealth paid for canals, museums, a famous Sephardic synagogue and later a ring of fortresses, so the province reads as a compact history of how the Netherlands was engineered and governed.
Amsterdam's Canal Ring, laid out in the seventeenth century, is a UNESCO site of concentric waterways lined with merchants' houses. The Rijksmuseum, in its grand nineteenth-century building, holds Rembrandt's Night Watch and works by Vermeer. The Portuguese Synagogue, completed in 1675, still has sand on its floor and is lit by hundreds of candles. The Tuschinski Theatre mixes Art Deco and Amsterdam School styles in one of the most richly decorated cinemas anywhere.
Beyond the capital, Teylers Museum in Haarlem is the oldest museum in the Netherlands, with an oval gallery of fossils and scientific instruments unchanged since the eighteenth century. At Zaanse Schans, working windmills and green wooden houses recall the industrial Zaan region, and Naarden is a near-perfect star fort ringed by double moats.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Van Gogh Museum | Museum | |
| 2 | Rijksmuseum | Museum | |
| 3 | Anne Frank House | Museum | |
| 4 | Zaanse Schans | Open-air museum | |
| 5 | Teylers Museum | Science museum | |
| 6 | Amsterdam Canal Ring | Canal | |
| 7 | Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam | Synagogue | |
| 8 | Tuschinski Theatre | Theatre building | |
| 9 | Naarden Fortress | Star fort |
01 Van Gogh Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.4 km from Amsterdam52.358° N 4.881° E
GoldenArtists · CC BY 4.0 No other museum holds as much of Vincent van Gogh's work: about 200 paintings, 400 drawings and 700 of his letters. The collection survived because his family kept it. When Vincent died in 1890 his unsold work went to his brother Theo, who died six months later.
02 Rijksmuseum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.2 km from Amsterdam52.360° N 4.885° E
Image by user32212 from Pixabay The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands and the place to understand the Dutch Golden Age in one visit. It was founded in The Hague in 1798, moved to Amsterdam in 1808 on the orders of Louis Bonaparte, and spent decades in borrowed rooms before Pierre Cuypers won a competition for a new building.
Did you know? In April 1942 much of the collection was hidden in a purpose-built vault deep in the tunnels of the Sint-Pietersberg hill near Maastricht.
03 Anne Frank House
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 3.3 km from Amsterdam52.375° N 4.884° E
Lệ Xuân · CC BY-SA 4.0 From the street, Prinsengracht 263 is an ordinary Amsterdam canal house: built in 1635, refaced in 1740, used over the centuries as a home, a stable-fronted warehouse and a workshop. What makes it one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands is the building behind it.
04 Zaanse Schans
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 15.1 km from Amsterdam52.474° N 4.816° E
Image by 3345557 from Pixabay The Zaanse Schans is a riverside village of green wooden houses and working windmills on the bank of the Zaan, just north of Amsterdam.
Did you know? The original De Kat burned down in 1781 and was rebuilt within a year, before stopping work in 1904.
05 Teylers Museum
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 0.7 km from Haarlem52.381° N 4.640° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay Teylers Museum in Haarlem is the oldest museum in the Netherlands and a rare surviving museum of the Enlightenment: a place where each room was fitted out in the spirit of its own time and then, remarkably, left almost untouched.
Did you know? Besides Michelangelo and Rembrandt, its drawings collection includes sheets by Raphael, Guercino and Claude Lorrain.
06 Amsterdam Canal Ring
Amsterdamse grachten
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.3 km from Amsterdam52.365° N 4.888° E
Image by Rianne_SchillerMclean from Pixabay The canal ring of Amsterdam is one of the great pieces of planned city-making in Europe. In 1613 the city began digging a set of concentric waterways around its medieval core, and three of them, the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht and the Prinsengracht, became the grand arcs that still define the centre.
Did you know? Every year between 12,000 and 15,000 bicycles are fished out of Amsterdam's canals.
07 Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam
Portugees-Israëlietische Synagoge
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 1.8 km from Amsterdam52.367° N 4.905° E
Tadeáš Bednarz · CC BY-SA 4.0 When the Sephardi community of Amsterdam — descendants of Jews who had fled Portugal and Spain — opened its new synagogue on 2 August 1675, it was the largest synagogue in the world. The architect was Elias Bouwman, and work had begun only four years earlier, in April 1671.
Did you know? Even today the main sanctuary has no electrical system at all, so evening services rely entirely on candlelight.
08 Tuschinski Theatre
Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 2.1 km from Amsterdam52.366° N 4.894° E
User:DirkvdM · CC BY-SA 3.0 Behind a facade flanked by two towers in a narrow street off Amsterdam's Rembrandtplein lies one of the most extravagant cinema interiors ever built.
Did you know? The design is credited to Hijman Louis de Jong, though Willem Kromhout was involved from the start and took over after disputes.
09 Naarden Fortress
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 21.6 km from Utrecht52.293° N 5.158° E
Helfmann · CC BY-SA 3.0 Naarden is one of the best-preserved fortified towns in Europe, and one of the few where the whole system can still be read at a glance: a small grid of streets inside a double ring of ramparts and moats, laid out as a six-pointed star on the flat, watery land east of Amsterdam.
Did you know? After the Franco-Prussian War, bombproof barracks were dug into the bastions, along with a bombproof hospital, a bakery and sunken mortar casemates.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in North Holland?
- On our list, Van Gogh Museum ranks first, followed by Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank House.
- What is the oldest museum in the Netherlands?
- Teylers Museum in Haarlem, which opened in 1784, is the oldest museum in the Netherlands. Its Oval Room is one of the earliest purpose-built museum galleries.
- Where is The Night Watch?
- Rembrandt's Night Watch hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in a gallery designed around it.
- Why are Amsterdam's canals arranged in rings?
- The Canal Ring was planned in the seventeenth century as a city extension, with concentric canals for drainage, transport and defence. The plan allowed Amsterdam to grow outward in an orderly way.
- What kinds of places are there to see in North Holland?
- In our collection, the places in North Holland are most often museums (3), synagogues (1), star forts (1) and canals (1).
- How many places are on this list in North Holland?
- The list covers 9 places.